MOSSVILLE -- Miracle Deliverance Holiness Church remains a spark of spiritual life in the otherwise dying town of Mossville, where prayers for miracles and deliverance are nearly all that's left.

On a Friday afternoon in August, a few dozen congregants stood inside the church, shaking to the sounds of rolling organ notes and quick drum beats. Some people dropped to the floor, their faces twisted with bliss and pain. Fellow worshippers covered them with blankets.

But for all of the faithful exuberance inside, the physical world pressing in on the church's walls is decaying. Every three or four days, another house disappears from the streets around the church. Concrete slabs and mailboxes mark the departed.

The community is surrounded by 14 factories -- including an oil refinery, a coal-fired power plant and chemical-makers. The industrial encroachment already forced Miracle Deliverance believers to relocate once. Now, the town is fading away around the church's white steeple.

Former slaves founded Mossville 150 years ago as a hopeful haven from discrimination, where locals once farmed and fished and shared in the natural bounty.

One year ago, South African chemical company Sasol offered to buy the entire town to create a buffer zone for its planned $21 billion industrial complex on 3,034 acres of land outside of Lake Charles. It stands to be one of the largest foreign investments in U.S. history.

Part of the cost is the disappearance of Mossville.

More than a decade ago, Miracle Deliverance, led by Bishop Johnny Clophus, held car washes and barbecue sales to help raise $400,000 to build a new church building -- after a different chemical company bought out the church's old neighborhood.

People come a long way to visit the church, in search of the miracles, Clophus said, and his congregation is committed. The charismatic gatherings will continue in the same spot.

Lately, though, anguish has characterized the town. The bishop, like all of his neighbors, has been forced into a decision.

Sasol's buyout offer is voluntary -- at least in the sense that residents have a stark choice of selling or living in the shadow of a massive petrochemical complex -- and non-negotiable. Every homeowner is being offered a minimum $100,000 plus 60 percent of the appraised value of the house. Every bought-out house is quickly demolished.

Sasol's deal gives a glimpse at how new and expanding chemical companies relate to local communities today, an issue facing towns in the New Orleans area and southeast Louisiana. Along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, an estimated $23 billion in new factories and expansions are planned or underway. In Lake Charles, that number exceeds $73 billion.

In Mossville, the idea of leaving home, history and heritage is not easy for some.They are resolved to stay but wonder what that future will be like. The landscape already has the look of a tornado's aftermath: bare foundations in empty lots, driveways leading nowhere.

Others are relieved to go, after years of seeking a way out, watching property values driven down by the industrial encroachment. The minimum offer is more than they could sell their houses for now, if they could find a buyer at all.

The Mossville community would be the fifth settlement of former slaves in Louisiana to be bought out by industry. Reveilletown, Sunrise, Morrisonville and, most recently, the Diamond community of Norco have all been displaced.

Founded by former slaves

The unincorporated town lies west of the Calcasieu River, near the city of Westlake, where thousands of other people live uneasily snuggled among the plants. Acrid smells float on the air, eerie lights penetrate the night and networks of pipes twist over the roadways.

The town is a collection of a few hundred houses, a handful of churches, a recreation center and one remaining business: a barbecue joint called Heaven on Earth.

A water tower with the town's name painted across it is one of Mossville's few markers.

After the Civil War, Mossville was settled by the former slaves of wealthy businessman Henry Moss, who was born in 1796 and owned land on nearby Bayou d'Inde. That was when waterways were essential for commerce and trade, said Tom Watson, a retired history professor from McNeese State University. Moss owned a tannery, cattle herds and crops, and 59 slaves.

After the war ended in 1865, the freed men and women moved two miles north from the bayou, onto Old Spanish Trail, and founded Mossville in what was then an isolated area, Watson said.

Old-timers remember days of farming and fishing, going to class in local schools, a crowd of kids playing together at the recreational center off the town's main drag, neighbors treating each other as family, baptisms in the bayous.

Factories showed up in the 1940s, driven by a new state tax break. Companies building plants took advantage of 10 years without paying any property taxes on their high-dollar facilities. It's an incentive still used today.

"We lived in Mossville in the '60s, and this used to happen, probably about every other month: Something blew up at the chemical plant, which shake the house, shake the bed," Wilfred Clophus said. "I'll never forget that."

The population has dwindled but numbers are hard to come by; the census doesn't specifically track the town. Like many rural communities, Mossville has lost many of its young people to the cities.

Sasol's plans

This year, Sasol is building an $8 billion ethane cracker facility, which breaks down the molecules of ethane found in natural gas and creates ethylene, a key ingredient for the petrochemical industry. It's used in products such as food packaging, fragrances, detergents and tires. That plant is expected to begin operating in 2018.

In 2016, Sasol plans to launch construction on a gas-to-liquids facility. The plant will convert natural gas into diesel fuel and other liquids, producing 96,000 barrels every day.

The company says it's the first gas-to-liquids plant in the United States. It is estimated to cost $11 billion to $14 billion and is slated to open in 2019.

Michael Hayes, Sasol's spokesman for U.S. mega-projects, said the infrastructure of southwest Louisiana is perfect: access to cross-country pipelines, highways, railroads and a deep-water port.

"We don't think that our facility is going to represent an environmental harm, an environmental hazard, a safety harm or safety hazard, but just by virtue of how close we will be to those neighborhoods, we felt it appropriate to honor the request to give those individuals the opportunity to move," Hayes said.

The state of Louisiana is giving $257 million in incentives to Sasol, including payroll rebates, workforce training and grants. But the industrial tax exemption program could put Sasol's savings in avoided local property taxes at as much as $3 billion, according to the estimated project value and local tax rates.

Mossville advocates point out that in the state's agreement with the company, there were no protections for neighboring property owners.Most people are leaving

What's happening in Mossville was foreshadowed more than 15 years ago. Journalists from around the world parachuted in for stories about the community's uneasy relationship with the nearby chemical plants.

CNN labeled it a "toxic town." The network's on-air doctor, Sanjay Gupta, gathered a group of Mossville residents in a room and asked about their ailments on national television.

It was the time of growing awareness of what was being called "environmental justice," the issue of poor and minority communities living near chemical plants, industrial facilities and waste dumps. Questions grew -- from Love Canal to Cancer Alley -- about the long-term health effects on those along the fence line.

The town has been through a buyout once before, when chemical company Condea Vista settled a class-action lawsuit over groundwater contamination from its polyvinyl chloride facility in the 1990s in the eastern neighborhood of town.

Sasol inherited that land after acquiring Condea Vista. All that's left today is a grid of streets and mostly vacant lots overgrown with weeds. Plant security workers patrol the area in pickup trucks.

Sasol is offering a minimum price of $100,000 with an additional 60 percent of the appraised value of the house, which is not negotiable. The company also pays for other expenses, such as closing costs and clearing title to the property.

"We had a number of people who said, 'Mossville is my home. I'm not interested in your money. I want to live here the rest of my life. I love where I live. I'm not going to sell,'" Hayes said. "We said, 'OK, we'll honor and respect that. We will work with you as a near neighbor going forward.'"

The events in Mossville stand out for the sheer scale of Sasol's project going up next door and the quiet way that the town is dissolving, without many of the public fights and acrimony of past clashes.

Michael Lythcott, a consultant on industrial buyouts, said demand dries up in housing markets so close to industry, even as sellers reduce prices. The houses become low-rent properties for the poorest families, who often don't find jobs inside the plants, creating "an environmental ghetto," he said.

Lythcott, who helped negotiate the relocation of Morrisonville residents in Iberville Parish with Dow Chemical in the late 1980s, said companies stand to save millions of dollars in lower costs on property and casualty insurance premiums by creating a buffer zone. "The plant will work out a deal that is in the best interest of the plant," he said. "If something goes wrong at a plant -- let's say something is leaking long-term low-level and people gets sick in the community -- who pays for the medical expenses? Somebody's insurance company."

Sasol has made offers to about 550 of the nearly 750 property owners who applied to the buyout program, which includes Mossville and a neighborhood to the north.In Mossville, 229 homeowners and 134 vacant landowners have accepted. Dozens more are still wading through the process of appraisals and calculations, days of waiting and wondering how much their homestead is worth in hard numbers on paper.

By mid-December, 42 homeowners had rejected the final offer. A Sasol spokesman said in January that some offers will be reopened because of confusion over deadlines.

Meanwhile, the Port of Lake Charles agreed late last year to use expropriation to force some remaining private landowners to sell. Those property owners are within the plant's footprint and along a proposed roadway for hauling heavy equipment from the port to the construction site. The port would lease the land back to Sasol.

Moving on while staying close

Wilfred Clophus and his wife, Cynthia, had spent nearly 22 years on Moss Avenue, in the heart of Mossville, where they raised their three sons, when news of the buyout reached the family on local TV news.

They knew it was time to go. Their three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath white house, built in the 1950s with a 2007 addition, was only getting older. Sasol was offering an opportunity they doubted they would ever see again.

But they felt the heavy tug of grandchildren, their father's church and the simple feeling of home.

As industry expands in the Lake Charles area, new houses are under construction. While driving around one day in 2013, Wilfred spotted the Barcelona subdivision. A gray-and-white brick house was nearly finished. He asked the builders if they had a buyer. Soon, the Clophuses had a deal -- a new house, mortgage-free.

The house sits less than 200 yards from the edge of what most people think of as the Mossville town limits, where Sasol's buyout offer ends, and within two miles of where Sasol is building.

"It was a big decision that we had to make," Cynthia Clophus said. "Do you want to leave the home that you raised your kids in and relocate to somewhere else? Thank God we found this place here, that we didn't have to move that far away.

"We have 11 grandkids, and that's my life. My kids are my life. I didn't want to move far away from them, where it would be inconvenient for them to get to me every day."

One son and his family moved into a new house next door, having taken a buyout; another son and his family live one street over in the same subdivision. A third son lives with his family in Lake Charles.

The new house on Magdalena Street, however, keeps them in the shadow of an ever-present risk. Clophus points to a line of trees that marks the edge of the buyout, near the railroad tracks.

"A lot of people say that we're still in the danger zone," Clophus said. "If something happened bad at night, when we're sleeping ... we would probably never make it out of here. We would probably never get out."

It was a risk they were willing to take. Would they ever get this kind of money for a new house again?

Their old house was torn down after they moved onto Magdalena Street in February. The concrete slab and basketball court, where their family name is scrawled into the pavement, remains for now.

They're moving on. On their new front porch, the names of their 11 grandchildren, and one cousin, are carved into their new porch: Nevaeh, JoJo, E.J., Dominic, Rey J, Austin, Viola, Haylee, KeKe, Tre, Callie, Lexie.

For Bishop Johnny Clophus, the decision about his church, and his home, was never in doubt.

"This is a place that God gave me," Johnny Clophus said. "If I were to sell it, it would be disobeying God. He's the one who told me to build it."

He is an 83-year-old great-grandfather. He still lives in the house where he raised a family and sent his children out to begin families of their own, on a street named after him, J. Clophus Road.

His previous wife, who died of cancer in 2008, is buried in a plot on the 15 acres of land around the church. Even if people move out of Mossville, he said, they'll still drive in for church.

The sanctuary sits about two miles from the neighboring industrial cluster. Sasol's expansion will bring it closer.

He used to haul chemicals as a truck driver and has lived around the plants for 50 years. "I don't need Sasol's money," he said. "I've been poor all of my life. I'm used to that."

Sasol hired a real estate firm to manage the property buyout program. It operates out of the only Mossville school building left standing after buying it from the School Board.

One morning, before Sasol was to move in, Bishop Clophus toted seven of his grandkids up to the school to give them a tour, a last chance to look around.

"I hope Mossville still stays on the map, they don't change it to something else, like a refinery name or something," Clophus said. "I like to see the water tower with Mossvillestill written on the water tower. I wouldn't want to see them tear down the school."

But, he said, "It's up to them, what they want to do with it. They bought it."